I saw a question on Stack Overflow, Tax on iPhone developer payments, and figured I’d go in there to share what I thought was correct: that Apple doesn’t withhold taxes.

Fortunately, other people got there first. And even more fortunately, I was wrong.

(UPDATE: Nope, I was right. Nothing’s being withheld from mine. Don’t know why. Ignore the rest of this post, I guess.)

Apple’s developer payments from iPhone App Store sales are… uninformative. Around the 10th of each month, you can download sales report CSVs from the previous month by country/region from iTunes Connect. They’re fairly verbose and there’s no easy, web-based way to view simple totals: you have to calculate everything yourself from the sales reports. (Apple’s web-based control panels are usually very bad.)

Then, around the 20th of the month, you get paid for the previous month’s sales, except you could miss it if you aren’t paying attention to your bank account. You’re paid in one big direct deposit for sales in North America, then in a series of up to 4 (?) wire transfers over the next few days, each from a different region or country’s currency exchanged for U.S. dollars at the time of the transfer.

Nothing is ever mailed, and there are no statements or stubs available. The only information I have is the set of cryptic sales report CSVs and the bank deposit amounts. I assume that I’ll get a W-2 since they’ve apparently been withholding taxes, but I really have no idea. There’s nowhere on iTunes Connect to download or view such information.

I assumed that taxes weren’t being withheld, but fortunately, I’m apparently wrong, and I could be getting a 30% raise over what I thought I was making.